


Role, Play

by Morbane



Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Constructive Criticism Welcome, F/F, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 22:09:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Early Rosethorn/Lark; Rosethorn exploring her facets as teacher, lover, healer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Role, Play

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magic_at_mungos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magic_at_mungos/gifts).



Rosethorn had not expected that she would become anyone’s teacher. When Bianda had recovered enough to be up on her feet, she was turned over to Pearlhue, a Water dedicate, whose interest in textiles centred on dyes. But Bianda had coaxed from Rosethorn her love of tea, and one afternoon a week she contrived to sit with Rosethorn in her garden, drinking black Namornese tea almost smoky enough to be Trader blend, or lemon verbena that Rosethorn had grown. The one afternoon a week became several, and sometimes extended into evening.

“How do you do that?” Rosethorn marvelled. She had walked by the loomhouses on one particular day, and, seeing her through the open door, Bianda had jumped up from her lesson like a child wanting to play. She had excused herself so prettily that Pearlhue had smiled as she waved her off. “If you were anyone else,” Rosethorn said, “Pearlhue would be complaining about you or me to Withy, and he would complain to Moonstream, and then it would turn into politics. What do you _say_ to people?”

Bianda shrugged. When she did that her whole body moved, as if a pebble had dropped into a pool centred in her shoulders. “I was a dancer,” she said, pausing minutely on the word _was_. “I was one of many dancers, and they’re like a herd of cats. All moody, all extreme. You learn to get along.”

“Perhaps you learn to flatter,” Rosethorn said shrewdly, and was rewarded with Bianda’s grin.

Rosethorn knew that Crane had a wooden Chammuri chess set whose knights, carved like slant-eyed cats, looked uncannily like Bianda herself. Even better, the rooks were shaped like fir trees, a device closer to Rosethorn’s heart. Rosethorn felt like a rook - straightforward, blunt, protective - while it was only natural that Bianda should leap about like a wind-borne leaf.

“You wish to borrow my chess set?” Crane said when she appeared, ostensibly to discuss the quality of manure that the temple gardens received these days. This was the sort of subject Rosethorn loved to needle Crane with, as it was the kind of thing the former noble almost thought too dirty for his consideration.

“Is there some difficulty with that, Crane?” said Rosethorn. “Because I really came by to take care of the fertiliser problem...”

Crane barely needed to lift his chin in order to look down his nose at her. “Don’t try to be subtle,” he said, “I will die of shock. This stitch-witch from the Mire has made an impression on you, hasn’t she?”

“Magic occurs in all walks of life,” retorted Rosethorn, wondering if it was worth the breath, “which you well know. May I borrow the chess set, then?”

“Yes,” said Crane, or Crane’s nose, “but do sort out the manure too, please.”

 

The teaching came about by accident, or by nature - Bianda’s. She was curious, with the self-possession of a person who is well used to figuring out a strange place. She asked Rosethorn a hundred questions about her garden. She asked about the ties Rosethorn used to hold up the runner beans. She asked about the plants from which fibres came, and Rosethorn showed her sketches of exotic cotton plants and talked about her attempts to grow hemp.

“You could have been my teacher after all,” Bianda said, thoughtful.

Rosethorn raised an eyebrow. “You don’t seem unhappy with Pearlhue. And I can’t even spin.” They both heard the edge in her voice, and Rosethorn stopped. What’s making me so cautious? she wondered. “Besides, if I were your teacher, I couldn’t do this,” she said, changing course completely. She reached out to trace Bianda’s head through her dark curls, cupping the other woman’s chin before her hand fell away.

Bianda looked at her for a moment that was slightly too long for comfort. Then she slid across from her seat to Rosethorn’s bench, leaned down into Rosethorn, and kissed her.

Rosethorn’s hand went up to Bianda’s shoulder, tracing patterns with her thumb, and under her hand she could feel Bianda shrug into a kind of bonelessness, like an animal going limp in the sun, or like an acrobat relaxing after holding a pose for a very long time. In the middle of their kiss, Bianda’s lips curved, and Rosethorn wondered if she’d ever felt anyone smile against her skin in such a way.

 

Some while later, Rosethorn remembered her defensiveness. It was true that she had found Bianda first, a coughing invalid in Urda’s House, and while nursing her, noticed magic in a scrap of cloth Bianda owned. Bianda claimed to have woven the ragged scarf herself, which made Rosethorn suspicious. To test her theories while fulfillling the secondary purpose of occupying the bedridden woman, Rosethorn had brought her mending to do, and sensed something beyond simple effort go into the work.

As the discoverer of a mage, Council law decreed that Rosethorn should teach this woman until a better teacher could be found. Rosethorn did not want to teach. She pointed out to Moonstream, her superior, the fact that plenty of weavers lived within temple grounds and that she, Rosethorn, had important gardening to do. Moonstream had agreed with minimum comment, and Rosethorn had wondered if there would be a hidden cost to the lifting of this burden. Here it was: increasingly fascinated by Bianda, Rosethorn begrudged lost hours which she could have been spending with this woman. But it could only have happened this way.

Bianda was tactful, Rosethorn was blunt. Bianda had lived decades outside the world of magic, while Rosethorn could not remember a time before she’d known how to make plants grow. Bianda had travelled all around the world and heard its stories, but Rosethorn, before her life at Winding Circle, had made one journey: from Anderran to Emelan. It was that journey which had cemented her aversion to sickness.

From a very young age she had been the mainstay of her parents’ farm. Her power was not with animals, but she could still charm the grain and hay that fed them. She could warn her father of blight that was yet invisible in fruit or on leaves; she could make the crops grow bigger and brighter than any in neighbouring fields. She dreamed of seeing the larger world but for now she was valuable enough, and valued enough, to stay where she was.

Rosethorn was coming into adult power when raiders struck her village. They didn’t get her, but they raped her best friend. They burned fields and took livestock with them - her father reckoned it a hard but fair trade for keeping her safe.

The year after that was hard. The burnt fields had hurt her when they burned, and she did not yet have the resources to spare herself the sympathetic pain. Grieving and weakened, she did her best to help restore the family holdings, but by the end of the year she was nearly burned out herself. For the first time in her life, she fell ill, and when the fever first broke, she had no magic to command.

Winding Circle was the acclaimed centre of ambient magic in Emelan and all the countries that bordered it. Her parents sent her there hoping their daughter’s magic could be restored.

Rosethorn relapsed into fever two days into the journey. She was an unhappy, ungrateful, and incoherent patient. She remembered snarling what few words she could get out; she remembered vomiting, soiling herself, choking up unpleasant medicines. She remembered overwhelming homesickness. She remembered helplessness.

As she recovered, at Winding Circle, she stamped out the homesickness with pure determination. The world she had awoken into rewarded her. The dedicates at Winding Circle helped her regain her magic, and taught her how she had mis-used it, and showed her plants she’d never seen before. She learned to read. She decided to stay.

She sent her parents various things from time to time - they felt like tithes - until she felt safe visiting them to reconcile in person. She alternately wondered if her father would have let her go if her illness hadn’t forced his hand, and told herself the subject was useless, not to be dwelled on.

Her skill at making medicines often brought her into contact with the sick. While her practical side saw the necessity, she could not help resenting it. She knew she’d once been a worse patient than any she encountered, and she hated to be reminded of that time.

It didn’t matter that Bianda had smiled, that she had said thank you, or that she had told Rosethorn foreign stories when Rosethorn had visited her in Urda’s House. To make the transition between seeing Bianda as a patient and seeing Bianda as a friend, Rosethorn had first needed to put some distance between them. Only then could she drink tea and play chess and think about the gracefulness with which Bianda stretched, folding and unfolding like Yanjing origami.

 

It was early evening, late in summer, and the sun wouldn’t set for hours yet. Rosethorn said, “Let’s have supper in the garden,” and Lark agreed. As a new initiate, she had midnight Earth worship all that week, and she wanted to sit outside until the stars came out and let the lateness of the hour sneak up on her.

Carrying out a plate of flatbread, Lark was pleasantly surprised to see a rug and cushions laid out behind the tomato plants - comforts which Rosethorn never bothered with when she was working. “Good,” she said, sitting and crossing her legs with her ankles on her knees, “and you brought tea.” 

“It’s slightly special tea,” said Rosethorn, with an odd tone to her voice, and a quirk to her full lips; some sort of game afoot. Lark pursed her own lips, and sipped anyway, noticing only a slightly burning aftertaste, like and unlike ginger. Rosethorn sat down on the opposite cushion and they shared out a light meal, including Rosie’s tomatoes, and, as an unusual luxury, an herb called basil.

When they’d eaten, Lark, with an unusual feeling of tenderness, was going to hold forth about the relaxation to be had in a good meal in good company, but stopped herself; it was not quite characteristic. “What was in the tea?” she murmured.

“A relaxant, mostly,” said Rosethorn. Her eyes were unfocused, pointed vaguely over Lark’s left shoulder, the way she did when her attention was deep inside a living thing - or, Lark realised, perhaps her eyes weren’t unfocused at all. She realised this when a branch of the herb called rosemary reached over her shoulder and twined around her arm.

“What-”

More branches were twining around her, some growing up underneath around her cushion, some wrapping lightly around her from the sides. In the heat of the day, and in the informality of the cottage they shared, she was wearing only a shift; the soft rosemary leaves tickled her arms. In a few long breaths she was almost immobilised in a living chair of wiry branches, padded with fragrant leaves.

“I like this,” Lark got out, dreamily, before Rosethorn said, “Good,” and shut her up briefly with a kiss.

“But I mean,” Lark said, trying again when Rosethorn’s mouth moved down to her neck, “why?”

“You had some interesting suggestions about ropes last week,” Rosethorn said, “and I thought, if I’m meant to be teaching you anything, I should perhaps try them out _first_.”

It was obviously a joke, so Lark, half amused and half interested, easily refrained from mentioning the factual experience on which her suggestions had been based. In Mbau, for example, a certain spring ritual involved a dance with veils, but what happened to the veils once they came off was almost as interesting as what happened to the dancer. Her friend Yasmin had described in detail another dance performed between two women in the more private inns of Sotat. And to be crushingly honest, it was not as though Lark had never experimented, with her own lovers, with restraint and consent.

And while this was running through her head, a little in slow motion, Rosethorn was reaching under her shift to caress her breasts, flicking the nipples lightly, which, in moderation, Lark quite liked. Rosethorn was sliding her hands up Lark’s sides so that her shift came up, and her bottom rested directly on rosemary. And the branches were still moving around her back.

Lark had no doubt that Rosethorn’s prodigal plant had her completely bound - confirmed by a wiggle or two - but if the effect was meant to be restraint then it was slightly off. She could feel Rosethorn’s personal brand of magic running through each shoot of rosemary and the faintly bruised leaves gave off a very familiar smell - rather as if her lover’s hands happened to be wrapped around her in ten different places, rather than two. It was not so much _thrilling_ as it was like being in a thorough hug. “Mm,” said Lark, and relaxed into the feeling.

As she did so, she realised she had arrived, by a roundabout route, at Rosethorn’s intention for this exercise. Rosethorn’s mind was engaged in the leaves which now skittered lightly across Lark’s breasts, leaving their scent on her skin; in the branches which swept slowly up and down her back and across the back of her neck; in the leaf-tips which twitched at the back of her calves. She could feel Rosethorn’s fierce attention to every point on Lark’s body the branches touched - and then she felt Rosethorn’s lips at her labia, startling Lark’s eyes open as Rosethorn lapped. _“Mmm,”_ Lark said, “that’s good - but leave the branches out of it, my dear, I want your hand down there,” and gasped at the interesting effect produced by a lover giggling against her clitoris. The tip of a rosemary branch stroked against Lark’s lips, a substitute kiss. The hand appeared as requested, first two fingers, then three, until Lark was bucking against Rosethorn’s thumb and suddenly very grateful that Rosethorn had risen up to kiss her as her world narrowed to a point on a wave.

The branches released her. Between the tea and orgasm Lark’s mind seemed to be moving wonderfully slowly, but it occurred to her that Rosethorn, standing above her, was looking unfairly smug, and that her back was to one of the trellises her tomatoes climbed.

Lark considered her options.

She was a stitch-witch, and that meant power with thread and... maybe things that could become thread. Flax, or wool, or... Rosethorn’s long and lovely chestnut hair.

Thus Rosethorn’s grin turned into a yelp and a look of dismay as her hair tied itself to the trellises. Lark cocked her head at the look in Rosethorn's eyes, wavering between uncertainty and a desire to play the game. Amusement won out, Rosethorn lowering her hands in surrender. "Two can play at this," said Lark, with both mischief and relief, at leisure to decide exactly what to make Rosethorn beg for.

Of course, knowing Rosethorn’s pride, a haircut might follow, and it might be a while before Rosethorn again dared to refer to herself as _teacher_.


End file.
